AuthorTopic: Local Self-Government (Read 38079 times)

We the People 2.0 Screening in Brentwood, NHApril 1, 2019what’s happening?Brentwood, NH, residents are hosting a film screening of We the People 2.0. The film shares stories from communities across the country who are facing harmful corporate activities. To protect themselves, they are confronting our legal structure, which elevates the rights of corporations over the rights of people, communities, and nature.

Brentwood residents face the same kinds of harms and the same legal structure as that of communities in the film. Threatened with the Granite Bridge Pipeline project, they are organizing to safeguard the air, water, and soil of their community.

CELDF’s New Hampshire community organizer, Michelle Sanborn, will be part of the discussion following the screening. With Sanborn, Brentwood residents will learn how New Hampshire communities are partnering with CELDF around water rights, sustainable energy, and freedom from chemical trespass, in addition to social justice rights.

Together, they are working to secure their rights locally and at the state level with a state constitutional amendment securing the right to local self-government.

Do Ecosystems Have Rights? This is an ad for a new book or something from http://CELDF.org

How Wealth Rules the World_As crackdowns on local democracy accelerate, and corporate and state interests continue their efforts to repress social movements, How Wealth Rules the World presciently reveals structures of power and law that facilitate blatant corporate supremacy in the United States. _Ben Price is CELDF's National Organizing Director. Using fifteen years of experience challenging corporate assaults across the country and a careful reading of U.S. history, Price shows how the structures of law that facilitated slavery and the fossil fuel economy have endured and adapted._Critically, Price shares how Community Rights and Rights of Nature movements are planting seeds of a new legal system that upends this paradigm, and that makes the liberty, civil rights and dignity of humans and ecosystems its ultimate purpose.

_I'm concerned that claiming that ecosystems have rights may undermine human rights and may actually give more power to governments and big corporations, whether unintentionally or not.

PS, I don't think the fossil fuel economy is all that bad (the monopolies in control of it are plenty bad though) and global warming is obviously fake news (as is often shown by links in my weekly Sci and Tech News thread).

The rights of an ecosystem would fundamentally appear to be determined by one's own values, which could extend to include others opinions of what those rights might be.

My view of rights is that they are actions or states that one doesn't resist - for example, a right to free speech exists to the extent that one doesn't act to impede it. In the case of the rights of an "ecosystem" this would similarly appear as the what states or changes of "it" (admittedly vague) that I would not act to impede.

As you have noticed as well, there are nuances that could be concerning if someone wanted to legislate this in precise logical detail:

1) What are the boundaries of an ecosystem? Does it include rainfall, which could be considered to include the evaporative cycles of water in nature as well as solar input from the Sun (and ultimately extended to include all of nature and the universe? ) Does an ecosystem also include the interactions along its bondaries with adjacent ecosystems? If so, does the boundary of that ecosystem continually expand to include everything else? In that case ecosystems would disappear and there would only be the universe inclusive of all ecosystems.

2) Is an ecosystem required to retain static properties or are evolutionary dynamics allowed? For example, if an ecosystem is vaguely a desert but over time, humidity rises and clouds tend to shade it more and provide more rainfall, is that "desert" required to remain hotter and dryer? Alternately, if someone went out to homestead an area of it and proceeded to retain rainwater, grow some hardened scrub and ultimately live farming off an area of the land, would that be a violation of "desert rights"?

3) Would there be unfairness of rights which needed action? For example, if parrots live in the bounty of luxiuous tropical rainforests while most scorpions plod through desolate landscapes in search of their next scrap of sustinance, should we "enforce equality" by transplanting scorpions into the rainforest (where they drown) and parrots into a scrubland to watch them similarly pass away from dehydration or starvation?

These are all simply extreme concerns and I know few people would agree that much of any of these are ideals, but the sad reality has been that I've run into a rotten apple or two and ultimately when push comes to shove, I've got to reserve the right to defend myself against anything that I perceive to be a problem ... so that may fundamently be where rights originate from - a desire to efficiently communicate what realm of actions are tolerated without forceful impediments.

Some suggestions on how to resolve possible problems to this would be to limit the scope of laws in both time and space and have them focused primarily upon the individuals most immediately involved.

Examples of this could be:

1) Limit the duration of applicability of laws (reduce its extent of influence over time) - in other words, expect that laws will need to be updated. Maybe adding a "Sunset" period to the law in which it either needs to be revoted upon or altered in order to remain applicable.

2) Limit the area over which the law applies - for example, instead of trying to create a law regarding all "desert ecosystems" (even including other planets etc.?), a local government can create its own unique set of laws regarding a specific area within its juresdiction.

3) Limit the law to being primarily applicable to the immediate disputes between individuals involved. In this case it would hardly even be considered a law but instead just a specific court ruling over a specific dispute regarding land use.

Thanks, Steve. For some reason Free Staters don't seem to be interested in local sovereignty much. They want to reform state government, but not local. Hopefully something will come along to get more of them interested. Like there's been talk of Free Town projects, but that doesn't seem to be going anywhere the way the liberals are with local environmentalism etc. I'm afraid the dummy liberals will try to start calling CO2 a pollutant and try to make laws against that. Global Warming has nothing to do with CO2. I'm a liberal libertarian myself.

Are you interested in working to improve local ordinances? That's what sovereignty means.

Instead of focusing on the political game, I've been moving toward being more independent and shifting what my time, attention, resouces and energy supports toward things more immediately important to myself. I can't say I've gotten nothing from basically being a "nice guy" but the return on investment hasn't been great and I've gotten tired of doing my part to support the rat race. It's hard to build something enjoyable and stable for the future when the rules keep changing.

I order to skip past a lot challenges, I've been focusing more on being self reliant and need less and less of "the system" to get by. Also, after bumping in to a few people who've been willing to stoop pretty low in trying to get what they've wanted I've realized there are times when it's appropriate for a bit more hardball approach, especially when reality puts you between a rock and hard place - in those cases there's really no choice, but there's also nothing (else) to lose, and though it can be rather sad and humbling on one hand, it can also be very liberating. If life has consequences no matter you do, then the flip side is that everything opens up as an option and it's more a matter of weighing those options than being restricted to having few or none.

On the CO2/Global Warming hype:

1) I was beginning to compute what the average temperature would be if 100% solar radiation (about 1000 watts per square meter) was absorbed and it was continually reradiated as largely infrared radiation into space by blackbody radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation - that's how parabolic heaters work, but I found someone else had already done that computation and the result was an average of 55 degs fahrenheit, which seems pretty close to what we have - it's colder at night and at the poles, but much hotter toward the equator and at day time.

In fact, I just had the thought that the temperature underground would be better representative of the average and CHECK THIS OUT!

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There are often talks of ground temperature being a constant 55F at 6ft or so.

It's practically sad to consider how much time, energy, resources, concern etc. have be wasted on the CO2 subject.

I actually think the smog reduction and clean air pressures are what caused some of drought in California and increased snow and hailstorms elsewhere. I'm not saying the reduction in air pollution is bad but when cars and factories were changed to burn emissions more cleanly, this resulted in less soot and ash, which is largely carbon being burned as well. When carbon is burned it becomes carbon dioxide (CO2) - no biggy, the plants love it (Global greening https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth/ - in fact most the other emissions regard nitrogen, phosphorus and organics which are all used in fertilizers, so pants don't have a problem).

One concern though is that burning those fuels with catalysts and at unnaturally high temperatures converts it to gases with little soot or ash like fires naturally produce. This reduces the ability for water vapor to condense into raindrops

CO2, nitrous oxides etc. are gases that are soluable in water, including water vapor and most natural fires produce smoke or soot which allows that water vapor to condense into rain, which returns those gases to the earth and thus tending to limit the quantity if those gases in the atmosphere. I don't think there's really much of a problem but if taken to extremes - we got rid of most all dust/soot/carbon/ash etc. and required fires to burn cleanly etc. then we'd (ironically? or is it just something about government being predictable?) end up with little of any rain and the density of those gases increasing over time. I seriously have wondered in the focus from carbon dioxied to carbon itself was intentional (considering how the failing global warming debate quickly switched to climate change instead, I wouldn't be surprised).

Also note that when "acid rain" is referenced, these would be a combination of largely carbonic acid (basically very diluted soda water) as well as phosphoric acid (which interestingly enough is also added to sodas to give the coke flavor!) and nitric acid, which could be more of a concern but nitrogen is not normally very chemically reactive and many plants aren't able to extract much nitrogen from the atmosphere and rely upon other sources of nitrogen to survive https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/soil-fertilizers/nitrogen-nodules-and-nitrogen-fixing-plants.htm otherwise fields can go fallow for years until nitrogen levels (as well as likely other elements becoming slowly available due to erosion or slowly deposited by rainfall).

I remember telling some people at work these ideas and a few weeks later there was a large brushfire near there. I was thinking that if the ideas were true we should see a lot clouds in the area soon or get some rain. The next day I came into work and there were flood warnings with the air smelling like a forest after a fresh rainfall. I mentioned it to a coworker and he said he'd already been thinking the same thing. There was another larger fire some months later and though it didn't rain it was interesting to see the brown smoke from the fire rise and slowly change into grey and white clouds. I did some searching on the net and found quite a few similar observations though usually phrased in a more negative way like "mountains near cities have less snowfall." (with the unspoken comment that it would instead rain more at lower altitudes with less humidity remaining to freeze as hail or snow elsewhere) or "clouds form downwind of cities" (makes sense).

Cloudseeding is a related subject. Also, the subject of chem or contrails is related because if the're fewer particles in the atmosphere for water vapor to condense, the humidity would increase and cause the atmosphere to be closer to its condensation point (Cloud chambers are a related subject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_chamber) and any disturbances or exhaust emissions would be more likely to cause condensation and have the trails persist for longer. (Also, with increased humidity, even without increased temperatures it could feel warmer )

In California we used to have a thriving agricultural industry (anyone remember California oranges ... seems like a thing of the past now) but with less rainfall and likely a reduction in soil fertilization. Another issue could be that with mass irrigation and transportation a lot of minerals, including rarer elements (boron, selenium and such - take a look at the ingredients in Miracle Grow ) are extarcted by growth locally and then transported, likely to a coastal city and the flushed into the ocean whereas prior to that those same resources would have been continually "recycled" locally by nature.

An interesting side idea is that rain will continually leech soluable materials from the ground as well as erode other materials into the ocean. The ocean is actually a great source of many minerals and some people have used ocean water or seaweed as fertilizers. Some plants can grow in highly saline environments (barley and potatoes). Some plants are even capable of semi encapsulating salts making them chemically inert and effectively performing desalinization. It could be interesting to discover a bit of value to sort of "returning" some of the ocean back to the mountains.

Well, once again I failed to make this short and not ramble. If you made it this far, mucho congrats man!

Steve, you can try to self-govern yourself, but I expect it'll be more effective as groups try to do it, instead of just individuals.

I just read lately that a major global event about 2300 BC caused a temperature drop of 2 or 3 degrees Centigrade. It also destroyed a large part of the Eastern hemisphere civilization by fire, i.e. many human settlements are found at that level to be thick layers of ashes. And many peoples migrated to new locations because the climate changed and became less hospitable where they had lived. In the Eastern hemisphere the climate generally got worse, while in the Western it got better mostly. The Sahara and the Middle East got very dry at that time. Moe Mandelkehr wrote a few books about all that. He concluded that the Taurid meteor stream likely had a large comet or bodies that hit Earth and produced high atmospheric dust that lowered the albedo and the average temperature. So the warming we had from the 1930s till about 2000 was only returning us toward the better climates that were experienced before 2300 BC. When global temperatures fall, the ocean levels fall, which allows settlement of more land at low altitudes. When temperature rises, sea levels rise, but ice sheets retreat allowing settlement at higher latitudes. The alarmists probably don't want to hear about such climate history.

Ray Archuleta, Alan Savory and others have been learning and teaching how to improve soil fertility and reduce desertification, so their findings can help humanity to improve climate even if astronomical catastrophes befall the Earth again. But it would be preferable to develop tech that can prevent such catastrophes in the future. Right?